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Make your own Wiki?

Has anyone ever created their own Wiki?

What I am basically looking for are the following capabilities;

1) Free (yes, I'm a tight-wad);
2) Private - I really only want to be able to own read/write access my content, with ability to allow others to view content by application only (unlikely);
3) Similar basic functionality to Wikipedia - search capability, hotlinking to other topics, et cetera; and,
4) WYSIWYG set up and editing.

Whether it is something that is easily set up locally or on the internet is just fine.

Allegedly, wikimatrix can help you pick a wiki provider - I saw references elsewhere to wikidot coming out on top of the free ones, but the discussions where that was said are several years old - ymmv.

You say free - if you already have a web hosting account, a number of the really good wiki packages are free & open source. I run a couple of mediawiki instances on mine, and it's not hard to maintain. My host costs me 40-50 dollars a year, but if all i wanted to do was a modest wiki, I could probably get hosting for around $20 a year.

I've just done this very thing after trying out a number of different solutions.

TiddlyWiki is very good but I wanted something that I could also access from my phone so that I could take notes on the go. I didn't try uploading to TiddlySpot but I have my own webspace so had other options. I think TiddlyWiki has an iPhone app called TiddlyNotes that may be able to sync with your account but isn't free (I think it's a princely one-off £2.50 or something like that!!).

In the end I checked my web-host who had a number of choices all ready to add to the website with a few clicks. I chose PmWiki although most of the other options would of worked. I chose PmWiki because it was easy to add a passworded account (not always that easy as it kind-of goes against the very point of a wiki) and easy to customise so it looked a bit more interesting. It's free and open-source so there are loads of add-ons (which actually are very easy to add on!), the few add-ons I've added actually work as promised! The only downside is that it is not WYSIWYG (although I believe there may be an add-on for this) but the markup script for the basics is fairly intuitive.

As it happens to have it, I work on wikis for a living. Not a bad way to make a living.

As you can probably already tell, the choice of wikis is broad and vast. When you're choosing your own, you have to prioritize what you like and choose accordingly. Just as some quick, easy answers, the following are some of the best "n00b" wikis:

MindTouch
Wikia

If you're willing to do a little bit of programming/CSS/HTML/javascript, I'd recommend:

Mediawiki (Free, but has a slight learning curve)
MindTouch (Again, but it has a *major* learning curve as there's an entire programming language behind it)
Drupal (arguably not a wiki, but might suit your needs)

You could also try Obsidian Portal, apart from learning a little Texile programming, you get what you put in, and you can make the whole thing private, so people cannot get into it without knowing your campaign. There is a limitation on storage, but you can pony up some cash to get that increased on a yearly subscription.

I recommend that you check out the "Featured Campaign" for how much you can do with it.